Thursday, May 31, 2012

Eli's Arrival Story

I will preface this post with this - I know that not everyone is interested in Eli's birth story, and I don't take offense to that, but I wanted to share anyways because it was a big deal for me. :)

My water broker at 6:30 am on Friday morning. At that point, my contractions were pretty mild and 11-12 minutes apart. I went about my business all day and they stayed about the same. I tried some at home exercises to get things moving and nothing. We went to the hospital to get checked at 11 pm. The midwife said I was maybe at 1 cm so she sent us home. We went home, had some lasagna and tried to get some sleep.

I woke up around 2 am and my contractions were 7 minutes apart. Not wanting to lose momentum, I woke Nathan up to go for a walk. We got back and they were about every 5 minutes and still tolerable. When we got home, the doula suggested some different tactics and the contractions picked up to every 3 minutes and were lasting about 2 minutes. Eli was
posteriur (sunny-side up) so I was having horrible back labor. Naively, when people had told me they had back labor in the past, I assumed that they just had really bad back pain and not the cramp/contractions. Boy was I wrong! By the time my back finally relaxed a little, the "regular" contraction hit and I wanted to give up.

Around 7 am Noah & Ava woke up and I just wasn't feeling right so I told Nathan and Hana, the doula, that I didn't want to be there anymore and I wanted to go to the hospital. I don't know what it was but I wanted to go. The car ride wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, in large part because of the doula. We got to the hospital around 8 am and the midwife checked me. She said I was at 4 cm and there was some bleeding that had just started in the car or in the hospital so she wanted the OB to check me. The anesthesiologist said that I should get an epidural so that if/when I needed a
c-section then I wouldn't have to have general anesthesia. I told him not to say that because those were about the max number of words I could get out! I told Nathan that I wanted the epidural either way! Women who do it naturally, especially with back labor, deserve a medal of honor or something! :) It really didn't matter though because the OB came in a few minutes later and checked me and found a lot of bleeding so we were off to the OR.

Apparently my heart rate was elevatated so they were concerned about infection since it had been over 24 hours since my water broke, Eli's heart rate was somewhat elevatated, there was a lot of bleeding, and I was no where near delivering (4 cm, 80% effaced, and -1 station). But the bleeding was the big one because it could have meant the placenta could have detached or that there was a rupture. All that led to the c-section. She said when they got in there, everything was
fine, except the cord was around his neck twice and apparently my uterus was "paper thin" around the incision so she wasn't sure that it would have been safe to continue anyways. It was still a much better experience than with the twins because I knew my OB, Nathan got to hold him for almost the entire time during the surgery and we got to do skin to skin in the recovery room. It was still disappointing to not be able to have a vbac and the recovery from the c-section has been smooth but still not pleasant.